FIRST RAYS OF THE NEW RISING SUN Jimi Hendrix. Produced by Jimi Hendrix, Edddie Kramer & Mitch Mitchell. MCA Records. April 1997. Double-play cassette & C.D.

What before times hath been seen, heard and smelt, now finally shall be spoken and uttered forth, when the world shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an open heart, bare head and bare foot, shall merrily and joyfully meet the New Rising Sun.

So wrote the author of the second ‘Rosicrucian manifesto’ (Confessio Fraternitatis) in 1615.
    Finally, 27 years after James Marshall Hendrix left this earth, the double-album he was working on at the time has been put together the way he envisaged. The First Rays of the Rising Sun have arrived.
    Are you Experienced? Axis Bold as Love. Rainbow Bridge. These are not ordinary pop album titles. These are messages of intent, love-letters from a soul journeying homeward to his fellow travellers : the Band of Gypsies. From that astonishing guitar intro to Little Wing, to the thundering drums and bass-lines of Hey Baby (New Rising Sun), his music lives on.
    As one who spent his formative years religiously trooping out every time a posthumous Hendrix album was released on vinyl, it was a shock to find these songs on one CD. After three listenings, it made sense. Hendrix never played a dud note, wrote a bad song, nor sang a word he didn’t believe in.
    I saw him twice - or was it three times? He was a cool dresser. Think of those pastel blues, pinks and reds he wore at Woodstock : an elegy of blue. While at the Isle of Wight he wore russet browns, orange and red; he was in tune with his surroundings. I saw him at Olympia at Christmas on Earth Continued. There was no ‘back-stage’ in those days. I saw him step off stage as polite and gentle as can be, just five feet away. At the Albert Hall it sounded as if he was playing a Norton Commando through a fuzz-box and wah-wah pedals until the Albert Hall had become his Amp and groaned with feedback.
    And so to all our friends we met on the ledge, and messengers of light who touched us, who left us, some physically, some mentally - they still talk to us; they climbed the mountain, and some were bewildered by the light. Some, like fire-flies, flicker out of the darkness and guide us onwards into the light. The dead have been talking to us down through the centuries. Why should it be any different today? The Tempest blew fresh from Shakespeare’s mind when the author of the Confessio saw a new spiritual age in the image of the New Rising Sun. Hendrix saw it too; this album proves it. He wrote it that we too might ‘wake from our heavy and drowsy sleep’. We few, we happy few, we band of gypsies.
    “A musician, if he’s a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain. That’s why music is so much heavier than anything you ever felt.” (Jimi Hendrix. Life Magazine. 1969)
    Columba Powell